Page 27 of The Mage on the Hill
“What am I concentrating on besides being scared to death?”
“Push. Down and out.”
Toby stared at him, hard tremors running from his thighs to his stomach. “I…. You know I can’t control this.”
“Breathe, Toby.” How Darius could look so wild and sound so calm was baffling. “Think. Push the bees. Down. And out.”
Vision and hearing tunneling, each breath thicker and heavier than the last, Toby still caught a hysterical giggle coming from somewhere.Oh. That’s me.Bees. Down bees, down. Out damned bees. Out I say. Life is but a walking beehive….
Everything faded in the wake of increasingly disjointed lines fromMacbeth, but this time he retained a tentative hold on the world. He couldn’t see what happened around him, though a distant thud reached him and scraps of Elias yelling.
The high-pitched whine that often accompanied climbing back to consciousness peaked, then eased down as Toby found himself staring at a ladybug crawling over a fallen oak leaf, the red of her shell startling against the crackled brown. Scents of dirt and leaf mold tickled his nose, damp and loamy. A dull ache made the act of moving his stiffened fingers more difficult.
“Certifiable,” Elias was saying to someone nearby. “And your big-boned ass is crushing my patch of arbutus.”
“Toby?” The hoarse, anxious call could only have been Darius.
“I checked on him. He’s all right. Having a little leaf nap. You hadnoway to know that’d work, Valstad.”
“Done it….” The grunt might have been Darius getting out of the aforementioned arbutus patch. “Before.”
“Still. You take chances. You all right, old man?”
“Mmm.”
Not an answer.Toby did his best to get his brain talking to his limbs again and had managed to prop himself on an elbow when Darius staggered over to sit beside him. “I’m… I think I’m okay. My hands hurt.”
Darius frowned. He tried to push the hair away from his eye, realized he had dirt all over his hands, and stopped with a disgusted snort. “Fingers move?”
“Yeah. It’s not a broken kind of hurt. More like I slapped something way too hard a bunch of times with both hands. Like I was playing tetherball with a bag full of wet sand.”
“All right, campers. Hike’s over for today.” Elias nudged his hip with the toe of his sneaker. “Think you can walk, Toby? Me trying to carry you won’t end well, and the old man is barely walking himself. I can go for the travois if we need it.”
With all the speed of a geriatric sloth, Toby got to his knees and figured he could probably risk standing. Darius was crawling around in the leaves, smoothing his hands over the ground, and Toby realized he was repairing holes and humps in the forest floor that hadn’t been there before.Up. I can get up.
A little shaky, a little precarious until Elias handed Toby his walking stick, he managed to get upright-ish and hobbled a few steps. “I think I’m good.”
“Slow and steady, then. Let’s start back down, and you pull up a log or a rock whenever you need to.”
“Darius?”
“Our prof will come when he’s ready.” Elias put a steadying hand under Toby’s elbow as they stepped down rock shelves to the wider path below. Voice lowered, he added, “Let him put himself back together a little. Leave the man his dignity.”
“Seriously? I’ve seen him in cardigans with elbow patches.”
Elias shuddered dramatically. “What’s left of it, then.”
While the walk back to the cabin took three times as long as the hike out, they arrived without anything more dramatic than a stumble or two. Darius limped up the cabin steps just as Toby had finished washing up at the kitchen sink. His hands had been filthy, his jacket needed washing, but other than a few leaves in his hair, he wasn’t too badly off. By contrast, Darius looked like he’d had a pitched battle with a nature goddess. He headed straight for the shower, reappeared a few minutes later in a clean T-shirt and boxers, and promptly went to sleep on the futon.
“Hasn’t had a lot of exercise lately, has he?” Elias whispered and gestured to the front porch.
They settled side by side on the porch bench with bottles of water and a package of Triscuits, listening to the rustle and flutter of woodland life.
“I don’t think he has. No. He was living all alone in that big house with the garden kind of getting overgrown. It wasn’t like he was living in filth or anything. Just, you know, neglect. The fridge and the cupboards were mostly empty when I got there. I think he forgot about food and sleep sometimes.”
“And after you got there?”
“I was in pretty bad shape. Guess he went into caregiver mode or something. Ordering groceries. Making meals. Bullying me into eating and telling me when to rest. He was doing better. Hewas. And then we went to see Arden.”
